Thinking about technology investments

According to the dashboard for this blog, I’ve made 4,255 posts. The very first one goes back to January 8, 2008 and was titled “Blogging on First Class“. It was an encouragement for people to look at FirstClass’ new blogging platform.

The post was actually the second written for this blog – the first one was “I hope this works” and was written just to test WordPress to see if it would do the trick. While I really hoped that people would use FirstClass for blogging, I needed to test out WordPress. It turned out to be a better blogging platform. More importantly, the writing of my first few posts was quite funny. It was almost infantile which I guess describes my blogging efforts back then.

Anyway, a lot has changed over the course of four years as noted in Bilton’s blog post. He notes that the iPad wasn’t around then. Yet, it’s so popular and universally present these days.

It really is the change over the course of four years that is of concern to me. Four years ago, I bought a computer and, with fingers crossed, assured my wife that this is the last computer I’ll ever need. It had an i7 processor with 8 cores, 4MB of RAM and a fairly substantial hard drive. Admittedly, it can run just about anything that I want. It was, as promised, a laptop that’s a desktop replacement and that’s basically where it’s used today. Dual booting, I can run Windows 7 and Ubuntu and if you’ve been reading, it’s typically running Ubuntu.

Indeed a lot has changed in four years. I think of the power and the storage on the machine and it’s a sad commentary that they really aren’t as important to my regular use these days as it was four years ago.

Four years ago, I needed a computer and software to do the word processing and spreadsheet documents (among other things) that I had on a regular basis. Quite frankly, I can’t remember the last time I opened LibreOffice to do any such work. In fact, as I type this blog entry, I’ve got a notification that there’s an upgrade to the LibreOffice program. Four years ago, I would rush to get the upgrade. Now, I use my Google Apps on the web to handle these things. Google takes care of the upgrades for me.

Post Christmas, every store that I ever bought anything online is pummeling my mailbox with notifications of great bargains and deals. I look and don’t feel the need to even wish and dream. After all, I spend my days in a browser. As I write this, I’m in one tab with a bunch of others open.

I’d be hard pressed to come up with any plausible reason to go computer shopping tomorrow.

In fact, the more I try to think this through, do I really need something as powerful (expensive) for the future?

How about schools?

I know many school districts are experimenting with Chromebooks and some with Surfaces. From where I’m sitting, and for my particular use, it seems like a very smart (and affordable) solution.